Embodiments of the invention(s) generally relate to the field of communications, and, more particularly, to downloading of web content in response to an embedded link in an electronic message.
Electronic mail (e-mail) is one of the most commonly used applications for distributed computer networks. The benefits of e-mail applications are obvious. Users can quickly communicate with one another. If a person is unable to pick up a message immediately, the message is stored until that person can review the stored message at a later time. E-mail messages also provide a quick and easy way to package information such as sales reports, graphics, and other data for transfer to another user by simply attaching the information to the message. Business users increasingly rely on e-mail messages to share ideas, transmit documents, schedule meetings, and transmit links to large amounts of information stored on a remote server.
The World Wide Web is the Internet's multimedia information retrieval system. In the Web environment, client machines effect transactions to Web servers using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is a known application protocol providing users access to files (e.g., text, graphics, images, sound, video, etc.) using a standard page description language known as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML provides basic document formatting and allows the developer to specify “links” to other servers and files. In the Internet paradigm, a network path to a server is identified by a so-called Uniform Resource Locator (URL) having a special syntax for defining a network connection. Use of an HTML-compatible browser (e.g., Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer) at a client machine involves specification of a link via the URL.
As is often the case, users place a link to a URL of interest within an e-mail message that they want the recipient to view. The recipient opens the message and either selects the link or copies the link into their browser and waits for the HTML page associated with the URL to be downloaded. In order to download the information, users must first wait while the browser software opens, contacts the Web server indicated in the URL, then downloads the corresponding HTML page to the user's computer. Depending upon the type of connection and the size of the Web content being downloaded, the downloading step could take several minutes. A method for downloading the messages with the Web content already present in the body of the message would be very helpful.